Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Spinning and Winning

by Rabbi Pinchos Lipschutz

Last Tuesday night, as results
from polling stations across the nation began to come in, it became obvious to
a non-partial observer that the Republicans were heading to a smashing victory.
Yet, the media was refusing to say that the Republicans had taken over the
Senate. Exit polls are conducted during the entire election day, and when the
polls close, it is possible to project a winner. As soon as the Republicans
racked up three of the six victories they needed to become the majority party
in the Senate, the media stopped revealing the results of their exit polling,
as they tried to digest the effect of what they had to know to be a fact.

The Iowa polls closed at 10 p.m.
Eastern Time, but it wasn’t until much later that the networks revealed the
results of their polls. By that time, it was known that the Republicans had
elected five new senators. If they had revealed the exit poll results in Iowa,
it would have been obvious that the Republicans were on to a historic win.
Instead, they spoke about races that they termed “too close to call,” as the
margins were razor thin. Actually, the results that were razor thin were the
ones that Democrats were winning. From the fact that they didn’t release the
results of the Iowa exit polls we deduced that the Republican had won and thus
flipped the Senate to their party.

That is how we realized that the
Republicans had won before the rest of the media called it and we went to press
at our regular time.

In fact, Republicans pulled out
huge victories. It took a few hours for that news to be digested and published.
Although the headline was inevitable, they comforted themselves by delaying the
results of race by race, as if that would change anything.

Their behavior reminds us, lehavdil,
of this week’s parsha, which describes Avrohom Avinu’s exchange with
Efron Hachiti. When asked to sell his property to Avrohom as a burial place for
Sorah Imeinu, Efron insisted at first that he wouldn’t accept any money from
Avrohom. “Listen to me, I have given you the field, and I have given you the
cave that is in it. I have given it to you...” (23:10).

The same word, “nosati, I
have given,” appears three times in the posuk.

Avrohom responded by insisting
that he didn’t want it for free, but wanted to pay for the property.

Efron seemed to reject the
request, saying, “What is a piece of land worth four hundred shekels of silver
between friends like us?” (23:15).

What happened? Why the sudden
shift from boundless generosity to self-serving entrepreneurship? Efron’s
initial offer in the first posuk was proclaimed “be’oznei bnei Cheis,”
before an audience of townspeople. That was what he said in public. The second posuk
is what he actually did when the spotlights were turned off.

Rashi points out that even the form of payment was
oveir lasocheir, high-value currency. Rashi quotes Chazal,
who say that Efron was an “osei me’at ve’omer harbei,” one who promised
big things but didn’t even deliver a little bit.

He separated words from action,
seeing speech not as a means to accomplish, but as the end goal. If he would
speak a certain way, he reasoned, he would earn the people’s respect and be
able to pat himself on the back,and
then do what he really wanted to when it came time to act.

Self-indulgent as it seems, it’s a
school of thought that has endured through the ages.

In modern-day America, they have
given this a name. It’s called “spin.” The facts make no difference. What
counts is how you present them. Most political teams have at the very top of
the totem pole someone responsible for spin. More important than the experts in
finance, foreign relations or law, this master of communication is
indispensable to an aspiring politician, because it’s not what happens that
matters, but how it’s presented. He twists everything to make it appear as if
his candidate is out front and in the right.

Last Tuesday night, the mainstream
media looked on as their beloved president, his message and his agenda were
hammered at the polls. They delayed telling the people about it, perhaps hoping
that it would go away and somehow work out the way they had incorrectly
anticipated. At the same time, they were crafting an appropriate way to present
it, something that would still paint the results as a victory for the
president, as he himself did. They, and he, decided that the shellacking of the
Democrats in historic proportions was a wake-up call from the American people,
declaring that they wanted the parties to work together. They also decided that
it was an anti-incumbent vote. The fact that no Republican incumbents lost
didn’t get in their way. Nor did the fact that if the people had wanted the
parties to work together to further the Democrat progressive agenda, they would
have simply accomplished that goal by voting Democrat.

With final results much more
sweeping than anyone had anticipated, the president seemed unmoved. Those who
won were running against Obama, his health plan, rising taxes, the progressive
agenda, the IRS scandal, open borders, immigration follies, the president’s
inability to project American strength, feebleness in dealing with ISIS and
Arab states, battles with Israel, and on and on. Yet, he said there was nothing
to change and all is good. He would press ahead with his plan to grant
executive amnesty, even though the congressional leaders told him that he was
lighting a fire that would burn him and ruin any hope of working together. He
remained unmoved, as he and his party began engaging in spin instead of serious
introspection and subsequent negotiations.

This koach -the
deception used by politicians and the media - has been the property of reshoim
since Efron sought to “spin” Avrohom’s request. Efron, we are taught, rose to
prominence merely due to the fact that Avrohom Avinu came to speak to him. That
was the first public relations victory. Then Efron seemed to generously gift
Avrohom with the property, earning him still more esteem from the people.

And then he got his money.

The people who began the current
battle against Torah are very clever. Instead of coming straight out and
declaring war against frumme Yidden, the reshoim from Yesh Atid
and Bayit Yehudi came up with a brilliant slogan. They called their campaign “shivyon
banetel.” They claim that all they are attempting to do is correct some
social imbalance. They claim that they really care about the chareidim
and that the campaign is all about improving their economic welfare.

Chas veshalom, they will tell you. They are not against
Torah, not against frum people, and not against yeshivos and kollelim.
They are against parasites. They want to straighten everything out and make
everyone even. And what is wrong with that?

They claim that the army
desperately needs manpower. Without drafting yeshiva bochurim, they
aver, the army is in danger of weakening.

What they really want to achieve
has nothing to do with the army. They merely hitched a ride on a convenient
emotional wave.

They seek to force kollel people
into poverty, contract yeshivos by shrinking their budgets, and change
the face of the Israeli rabbinate by putting in place liberal rabbis and dayonim
all across the country.

They want to do away with geirus
standards, with Shabbos laws, with kashrus laws, with gittin,
with kiddushin, with traditional marriage, and with the way secular and
religious Jews have co-existed since the founding of the state. They want to
reduce the role of Torahand halacha with thousands of cuts and
slices.

Yet, they spin it, stating that
they are the people with “ahavat Yisrael.”We are shrill baalei
machlokes, they claim, while they are men of peace, progress and
conciliation. We are divisive haters and demonizers, while they are progressive
purveyors of optimism and hope.

And more people than we would like
to admit buy into their arguments.

Many modern historians point to
the theory popularized by the biggest rasha in recent history. The Big
Lie theory was used by Adolf Hitler and later by his minister of propaganda,
Joseph Goebbels. The basic idea is that if a lie, no matter how ludicrous, is
repeated often enough and with enough persistence, people will eventually
believe it. These two evil men used this strategy to great effect, blaming Jews
for all the problems in the world, including the loss of life and the upheaval
of the First World War, the economic collapse, and health problems. It worked.

An old joke tells of the Jew
sitting on a bench in Warsaw, perusing a copy of Der Sturmer, the
hate-filled rag produced by the Nazi party. A friend passes by and says,
“Yankel, how can you hold that poisonous paper in your hands?”

“Look, Yossel,” sighs the first.
“I read the Yiddishe Togblatt and I learn how Jews are suffering here,
struggling there, and being persecuted in a third place. Then I read this and I
see that Jews control the banks, own the armies, and set stock-market prices!
It makes me much happier.”

The sad joke reminds us of this
truth. Propaganda is not just an industry, but a force that forms people’s
attitudes.

Last week, we wrote how Rav Mendel
Kaplan taught his talmidim to read and understand a newspaper. A good
friend told me a similar story about Rav Shlomo Freifeld, who would also peruse
the daily newspaper withhis students and use it as an opportunity to
convey timeless truths. One day, in 1989, he read a story about a wall that had
collapsed in the Kremlin due to an engineering failure. The article quoted a
Kremlin spokesman as saying that it was a structural error that would soon be
corrected.

Rav Shlomo turned to his talmidim.
“Within a year,” he said, “Communism will fall. It’s over.”

He explained how he had arrived at
that brilliant deduction. For decades, Mother Russia had never admitted failure
at anything. Spinmeisters, then known as propagandists, would cover-up the
truth and, when forced to admit the obvious, would cover-up for whatever it was
that had happened. “If they are conceding a mistake, even a relatively minor
one, then they’ve already given up,” he said.

Every day, we see reports of
goings-on in Eretz Yisroel and we bear witness to the deception, lies and
pro-Palestinian misinformation that shades every line in every story. “Israeli
Police Shoot Man in East Jerusalem” was the way the vaunted Associated Press
communicated the horrific, sadistic murder of a tiny, pure baby by a terrorist.
Hashem yinkom domoh.

The US Consulate in Yerushalayim
referred to the terror attack as a “traffic incident.”

News outlets described the obvious
attack as a crash that Israel, supposedly because it is an evil occupier, was
treating as a purposeful attack.

Despite repeated calls for a new
intifada and sloganeering across the West Bank calling on Arabs to use their
vehicles as missiles against defenseless pedestrians, the world has the
temerity to deny the obvious and find a way to blame whatever happens on the
Jews. They equate the casualties on “both sides,” as they push their agenda to
create a state for the poor Palestinians.

They know better. In an interview,
the mother of a terrorist who was killed carrying out one of these traffic
incidents, said, “I am so proud, I wish all my children would die that way.”

Yet the spin continues.

No one asks what happened to a
mother’s heart. No one asks where the motherly love, care and concern are.
Where has her desire to see her child grow up and have his own family gone? No
one wonders about the agent of change who snuffed out that most natural emotion
and buried it under blankets of hate.

To any objective person, it is
obvious that the mother is influenced by her imam, a political leader, the
media and the Palestinian “educators,” who spin and tell her daily about the
despised Jews and the great reward in store for those who harm them. The
propaganda has an effect, and that woman, like many hundreds of millions, comes
to hate and despise the Jew.

We must endeavor to uproot this middah
from ourselves. We must always seek to be truthful about every situation. We
should learn from the middas ha’emes of the avos and the Torah,
emulating our Maker, whose seal is emes.

Chazal contrast Efron’s obsequiousness with the
conduct of Avrohom Avinu, who was an “omeir me’at ve’oseiharbei.”

This past Sunday was the 13thyahrtzeit of Maran Rav Elazar Menachem Man Shach. Each year, on MotzoeiYom Kippur, the Ponovezher rosh yeshiva would commemorate a
miracle that occurred to him when he was yet a small child.

One Yom Kippur, a group of
wild Lithuanians grabbed little Leizer from the street in front of his house
and attempted to drive off with him in their wagon. When a neighbor noticed and
began to shout, they tossed him from the wagon and drove off.

In commemoration, Rav Shach
would host a small gathering each year. One year, when his close talmid,
Reb Refoel Wolf, visited on Motzoei Yom Kippur to drink a lechayim,
Rav Shach was engrossed in learning Shulchan Aruch Even Ha’ezer. He
waved Reb Refoel away, saying, “Nisht yetzt.”

Eventually, Rav Shach closed the sefer,
looked up and greeted him. Reb Refoel inquired what the rosh yeshiva had
been learning and why he wasn’t interested in his usual small celebration.

Rav Shach explained: “Last night,
during Kol Nidrei, I was given a Sefer Torah to hold. As I stood
there holding the Sefer Torah, I made a cheshbon hanefesh for
what I had done over the past year. I recalled that someone asked me advice
pertaining to an Even Ha’ezer matter and I remembered what I told him.
As I reviewed the matter in my head during Kol Nidrei, I realized that I
might have advised him wrongly and been oveir on yo’atznu ra. So,
when Yom Kippur was over, I wanted to go through the sugya again
and determine whether or not my suggestion was correct. I fear that I may have
been wrong.”

Rav Shach made a cheshbon
hanefesh for advice he had given someone during the year and wasn’t sure
about. In pursuit of the truth, everything else fell to the side, for emes
is our guiding light and, as we pursue it, everything else can wait.

Truth. We must be driven by the
truth. Not spin, not what sounds nice, not PR, and certainly not lies. We
should never hesitate to find out the truth before acting and to always
ascertain that we have not fooled others or let ourselves be misled.

We must be fastidious in all we do
and never fall back on convenient excuses to justify untruths.

Rav Mordechai Shulman, rosh
yeshiva of Yeshivas Slabodka in Bnei Brak, once noticed a letter in the yeshiva’s
office in which the administrator informed a donor that Kaddish would be
recited in memory of the donor’s father on his yahrtzeit.

Rav Mordechai read the letter and
told the administrator to change it. “By writing, ‘We will recite Kaddish
in the yeshiva,’ you make it sound like we will be saying Kaddish
specifically for his father. In fact, as you know, we say Kaddish for
several other people as well. It’s not emes. Please change it to, ‘We
will have his neshamah in mind when we recite Kaddish.’”

The administrator complied, but
the rosh yeshiva wasn’t done.

“I don’t want the donor to think
that he is absolved of his responsibilities to the soul of his father because
the yeshiva says Kaddish. Please add a request that he, too,
should learn Mishnayos.’”

The administrator obliged.

But Rav Mordechai wasn’t done yet.

“The image at the top of the page
contains candles and the posuk, ‘Ner Hashem nishmas odom.’ Please
remove that graphic, because it suggests that the yeshiva will be
lighting candles as well, and we don’t do that.”

The rosh yeshiva smiled. “Mir
zeht doh emes! What he’ll see is the truth!”

Once, when the Kletzker Yeshivawas experiencing great financial difficulties, the rosh yeshiva, Rav
Aharon Kotler, thought that there was a ray of light to rescue the yeshiva
from its dire straits. The great yeshiva of Volozhin was closed by the
government and the building sat empty. Rav Aharon thought that perhaps he could
move his yeshiva into that building.

Rav Elazar Menachem Man Shach was
then serving as a maggid shiur in the yeshiva. Rav Aharon sent
him to Volozhin to see if he could obtain permission from the roshei yeshiva
to move the Kletzker Yeshiva to their building, which was sitting empty.

Rav Shach returned from his
mission on a Friday, just prior to the onset of Shabbos. He quickly
prepared himself for Shabbos and made his way to the home of the mashgiach,
Rav Chatzkel Levenstein, to hear the weekly shmuess he delivered at that
time.

When Rav Shach entered the room,
Rav Chatzkel turned his attention to him and said, “Eved Avrohom anochi.”
Rav Shach and everyone else who was listening to the shmuess looked at
Rav Chatzkel in wonderment, trying to understand why he welcomed Rav Shach with
the words that Eliezer articulated in this week’s parsha.

The famed mashgiach
explained: “Reb Leizerhas just returned from performing a shlichus
on behalf of the rosh yeshiva. Let me tell you what happened. He reached
his destination and said, ‘I came to find out if it would be possible to
transfer the yeshiva of Kletzk to here.’ The people asked him if he is
the rosh yeshiva, but since he is an ish emes, he said, ‘No.’
They asked if he is the mashgiach, and again he said, ‘No.’ ‘If so,’
they asked, ‘what is your role in the yeshiva?’ He answered, in his
humility, that he is merely a maggid shiur in the yeshiva and that
the rosh yeshiva sent him to inquire about the building, but by then, it
was too late. He hadn’t made the right impression.”

Rav Chatzkel concluded, “Now ask
him if that is what happened and you will see that it is.”

Rav Shach would repeat the story
and say that everyone in the room was shocked at what Rav Chatzkel said, for he
had depicted exactly what had transpired upon Rav Shach’s arrival in Volozhin.

No, he didn’t succeed in his
immediate mission, but in the ultimate mission, he did. For he remained humble
and loyal to the truth. And we should follow that example. Whatever the cause,
it is not virtuous if you must lie to achieve it.

A nation is built with emes.
Torah is taught with emes. Gedolei Yisroel don’t need spin or propaganda
to transmit their messages. Neither should the rest of us. By focusing on what
we say and do, may we merit to emulate their ways, talking little, doing much,
and having healthy accomplishments.